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Jul 29

MALADE: Orchestration of LLM-powered Agents with Retrieval Augmented Generation for Pharmacovigilance

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), given their remarkable text understanding and generation abilities, there is an unprecedented opportunity to develop new, LLM-based methods for trustworthy medical knowledge synthesis, extraction and summarization. This paper focuses on the problem of Pharmacovigilance (PhV), where the significance and challenges lie in identifying Adverse Drug Events (ADEs) from diverse text sources, such as medical literature, clinical notes, and drug labels. Unfortunately, this task is hindered by factors including variations in the terminologies of drugs and outcomes, and ADE descriptions often being buried in large amounts of narrative text. We present MALADE, the first effective collaborative multi-agent system powered by LLM with Retrieval Augmented Generation for ADE extraction from drug label data. This technique involves augmenting a query to an LLM with relevant information extracted from text resources, and instructing the LLM to compose a response consistent with the augmented data. MALADE is a general LLM-agnostic architecture, and its unique capabilities are: (1) leveraging a variety of external sources, such as medical literature, drug labels, and FDA tools (e.g., OpenFDA drug information API), (2) extracting drug-outcome association in a structured format along with the strength of the association, and (3) providing explanations for established associations. Instantiated with GPT-4 Turbo or GPT-4o, and FDA drug label data, MALADE demonstrates its efficacy with an Area Under ROC Curve of 0.90 against the OMOP Ground Truth table of ADEs. Our implementation leverages the Langroid multi-agent LLM framework and can be found at https://github.com/jihyechoi77/malade.

Contextual API Completion for Unseen Repositories Using LLMs

Large language models have made substantial progress in addressing diverse code-related tasks. However, their adoption is hindered by inconsistencies in generating output due to the lack of real-world, domain-specific information, such as for intra-repository API calls for unseen software projects. We introduce a novel technique to mitigate hallucinations by leveraging global and local contextual information within a code repository for API completion tasks. Our approach is tailored to refine code completion tasks, with a focus on optimizing local API completions. We examine relevant import statements during API completion to derive insights into local APIs, drawing from their method signatures. For API token completion, we analyze the inline variables and correlate them with the appropriate imported modules, thereby allowing our approach to rank the most contextually relevant suggestions from the available local APIs. Further, for conversational API completion, we gather APIs that are most relevant to the developer query with a retrieval-based search across the project. We employ our tool, LANCE, within the framework of our proposed benchmark, APIEval, encompassing two different programming languages. Our evaluation yields an average accuracy of 82.6% for API token completion and 76.9% for conversational API completion tasks. On average, LANCE surpasses Copilot by 143% and 142% for API token completion and conversational API completion, respectively. The implications of our findings are substantial for developers, suggesting that our lightweight context analysis can be applied to multilingual environments without language-specific training or fine-tuning, allowing for efficient implementation with minimal examples and effort.

GeneGPT: Augmenting Large Language Models with Domain Tools for Improved Access to Biomedical Information

While large language models (LLMs) have been successfully applied to various tasks, they still face challenges with hallucinations. Augmenting LLMs with domain-specific tools such as database utilities can facilitate easier and more precise access to specialized knowledge. In this paper, we present GeneGPT, a novel method for teaching LLMs to use the Web APIs of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) for answering genomics questions. Specifically, we prompt Codex to solve the GeneTuring tests with NCBI Web APIs by in-context learning and an augmented decoding algorithm that can detect and execute API calls. Experimental results show that GeneGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on eight tasks in the GeneTuring benchmark with an average score of 0.83, largely surpassing retrieval-augmented LLMs such as the new Bing (0.44), biomedical LLMs such as BioMedLM (0.08) and BioGPT (0.04), as well as GPT-3 (0.16) and ChatGPT (0.12). Our further analyses suggest that: (1) API demonstrations have good cross-task generalizability and are more useful than documentations for in-context learning; (2) GeneGPT can generalize to longer chains of API calls and answer multi-hop questions in GeneHop, a novel dataset introduced in this work; (3) Different types of errors are enriched in different tasks, providing valuable insights for future improvements.

Analyzing Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information in Language Models

Language Models (LMs) have been shown to leak information about training data through sentence-level membership inference and reconstruction attacks. Understanding the risk of LMs leaking Personally Identifiable Information (PII) has received less attention, which can be attributed to the false assumption that dataset curation techniques such as scrubbing are sufficient to prevent PII leakage. Scrubbing techniques reduce but do not prevent the risk of PII leakage: in practice scrubbing is imperfect and must balance the trade-off between minimizing disclosure and preserving the utility of the dataset. On the other hand, it is unclear to which extent algorithmic defenses such as differential privacy, designed to guarantee sentence- or user-level privacy, prevent PII disclosure. In this work, we introduce rigorous game-based definitions for three types of PII leakage via black-box extraction, inference, and reconstruction attacks with only API access to an LM. We empirically evaluate the attacks against GPT-2 models fine-tuned with and without defenses in three domains: case law, health care, and e-mails. Our main contributions are (i) novel attacks that can extract up to 10times more PII sequences than existing attacks, (ii) showing that sentence-level differential privacy reduces the risk of PII disclosure but still leaks about 3% of PII sequences, and (iii) a subtle connection between record-level membership inference and PII reconstruction. Code to reproduce all experiments in the paper is available at https://github.com/microsoft/analysing_pii_leakage.

ToolCoder: Teach Code Generation Models to use API search tools

Automatically generating source code from natural language descriptions has been a growing field of research in recent years. However, current large-scale code generation models often encounter difficulties when selecting appropriate APIs for specific contexts. These models may generate APIs that do not meet requirements or refer to non-existent APIs in third-party libraries, especially for lesser-known or private libraries. Inspired by the process of human developers using tools to search APIs, we propose ToolCoder, a novel approach that integrates API search tools with existing models to assist in code generation and API selection. To teach our model to use tools, we introduce an automated data annotation method using ChatGPT to add tool usage information into the source code data and fine-tune code generation models. During inference, we integrate API search tools into the generation process so that our model can automatically use the search tool to get suggestions when selecting an API. Our experimental results demonstrate that ToolCoder exhibits excellent performance and generalization across five public and private library code generation benchmarks, with at least 6.21\% improvement on average pass@1 metrics and 9.64\% improvement on average pass@10 metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we show that our relatively small ToolCoder model is comparable to one of the current best models, GPT-3.5, highlighting the potential of incorporating programming tools into the code generation process.

ShortcutsBench: A Large-Scale Real-world Benchmark for API-based Agents

Recent advancements in integrating large language models (LLMs) with application programming interfaces (APIs) have gained significant interest in both academia and industry. These API-based agents, leveraging the strong autonomy and planning capabilities of LLMs, can efficiently solve problems requiring multi-step actions. However, their ability to handle multi-dimensional difficulty levels, diverse task types, and real-world demands through APIs remains unknown. In this paper, we introduce ShortcutsBench, a large-scale benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of API-based agents in solving tasks with varying levels of difficulty, diverse task types, and real-world demands. ShortcutsBench includes a wealth of real APIs from Apple Inc.'s operating systems, refined user queries from shortcuts, human-annotated high-quality action sequences from shortcut developers, and accurate parameter filling values about primitive parameter types, enum parameter types, outputs from previous actions, and parameters that need to request necessary information from the system or user. Our extensive evaluation of agents built with 5 leading open-source (size >= 57B) and 4 closed-source LLMs (e.g. Gemini-1.5-Pro and GPT-3.5) reveals significant limitations in handling complex queries related to API selection, parameter filling, and requesting necessary information from systems and users. These findings highlight the challenges that API-based agents face in effectively fulfilling real and complex user queries. All datasets, code, and experimental results will be available at https://github.com/eachsheep/shortcutsbench.

Reinforced UI Instruction Grounding: Towards a Generic UI Task Automation API

Recent popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened countless possibilities in automating numerous AI tasks by connecting LLMs to various domain-specific models or APIs, where LLMs serve as dispatchers while domain-specific models or APIs are action executors. Despite the vast numbers of domain-specific models/APIs, they still struggle to comprehensively cover super diverse automation demands in the interaction between human and User Interfaces (UIs). In this work, we build a multimodal model to ground natural language instructions in given UI screenshots as a generic UI task automation executor. This metadata-free grounding model, consisting of a visual encoder and a language decoder, is first pretrained on well studied document understanding tasks and then learns to decode spatial information from UI screenshots in a promptable way. To facilitate the exploitation of image-to-text pretrained knowledge, we follow the pixel-to-sequence paradigm to predict geometric coordinates in a sequence of tokens using a language decoder. We further propose an innovative Reinforcement Learning (RL) based algorithm to supervise the tokens in such sequence jointly with visually semantic metrics, which effectively strengthens the spatial decoding capability of the pixel-to-sequence paradigm. Extensive experiments demonstrate our proposed reinforced UI instruction grounding model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin and shows the potential as a generic UI task automation API.

LEMUR Neural Network Dataset: Towards Seamless AutoML

Neural networks are fundamental in artificial intelligence, driving progress in computer vision and natural language processing. High-quality datasets are crucial for their development, and there is growing interest in datasets composed of neural networks themselves to support benchmarking, automated machine learning (AutoML), and model analysis. We introduce LEMUR, an open source dataset of neural network models with well-structured code for diverse architectures across tasks such as object detection, image classification, segmentation, and natural language processing. LEMUR is primarily designed to provide a rich source of structured model representations and associated performance data, enabling the fine-tuning of large language models for AutoML applications. Leveraging Python and PyTorch, LEMUR enables seamless extension to new datasets and models while maintaining consistency. It integrates an Optuna-powered framework for evaluation, hyperparameter optimization, statistical analysis, and graphical insights. LEMUR VR extension enables the seamless deployment of models in virtual reality, optimizing their performance on resource-constrained devices. Providing tools for model evaluation, preprocessing, and database management, LEMUR supports researchers and practitioners in developing, testing, and analyzing neural networks. It offers an API that delivers comprehensive information about neural network models and their complete performance statistics with a single request, which can be used in experiments with code-generating large language models. The LEMUR and its plugins are accessible as open source projects under the MIT license at https://github.com/ABrain-One/nn-dataset, https://github.com/ABrain-One/nn-plots and https://github.com/ABrain-One/nn-vr.

LLM+Reasoning+Planning for supporting incomplete user queries in presence of APIs

Recent availability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to the development of numerous LLM-based approaches aimed at providing natural language interfaces for various end-user tasks. These end-user tasks in turn can typically be accomplished by orchestrating a given set of APIs. In practice, natural language task requests (user queries) are often incomplete, i.e., they may not contain all the information required by the APIs. While LLMs excel at natural language processing (NLP) tasks, they frequently hallucinate on missing information or struggle with orchestrating the APIs. The key idea behind our proposed approach is to leverage logical reasoning and classical AI planning along with an LLM for accurately answering user queries including identification and gathering of any missing information in these queries. Our approach uses an LLM and ASP (Answer Set Programming) solver to translate a user query to a representation in Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) via an intermediate representation in ASP. We introduce a special API "get_info_api" for gathering missing information. We model all the APIs as PDDL actions in a way that supports dataflow between the APIs. Our approach then uses a classical AI planner to generate an orchestration of API calls (including calls to get_info_api) to answer the user query. Our evaluation results show that our approach significantly outperforms a pure LLM based approach by achieving over 95\% success rate in most cases on a dataset containing complete and incomplete single goal and multi-goal queries where the multi-goal queries may or may not require dataflow among the APIs.

Deep Research Agents: A Systematic Examination And Roadmap

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to a new category of autonomous AI systems, referred to as Deep Research (DR) agents. These agents are designed to tackle complex, multi-turn informational research tasks by leveraging a combination of dynamic reasoning, adaptive long-horizon planning, multi-hop information retrieval, iterative tool use, and the generation of structured analytical reports. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis of the foundational technologies and architectural components that constitute Deep Research agents. We begin by reviewing information acquisition strategies, contrasting API-based retrieval methods with browser-based exploration. We then examine modular tool-use frameworks, including code execution, multimodal input processing, and the integration of Model Context Protocols (MCPs) to support extensibility and ecosystem development. To systematize existing approaches, we propose a taxonomy that differentiates between static and dynamic workflows, and we classify agent architectures based on planning strategies and agent composition, including single-agent and multi-agent configurations. We also provide a critical evaluation of current benchmarks, highlighting key limitations such as restricted access to external knowledge, sequential execution inefficiencies, and misalignment between evaluation metrics and the practical objectives of DR agents. Finally, we outline open challenges and promising directions for future research. A curated and continuously updated repository of DR agent research is available at: {https://github.com/ai-agents-2030/awesome-deep-research-agent}.

MapQaTor: A System for Efficient Annotation of Map Query Datasets

Mapping and navigation services like Google Maps, Apple Maps, Openstreet Maps, are essential for accessing various location-based data, yet they often struggle to handle natural language geospatial queries. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in question answering (QA), but creating reliable geospatial QA datasets from map services remains challenging. We introduce MapQaTor, a web application that streamlines the creation of reproducible, traceable map-based QA datasets. With its plug-and-play architecture, MapQaTor enables seamless integration with any maps API, allowing users to gather and visualize data from diverse sources with minimal setup. By caching API responses, the platform ensures consistent ground truth, enhancing the reliability of the data even as real-world information evolves. MapQaTor centralizes data retrieval, annotation, and visualization within a single platform, offering a unique opportunity to evaluate the current state of LLM-based geospatial reasoning while advancing their capabilities for improved geospatial understanding. Evaluation metrics show that, MapQaTor speeds up the annotation process by at least 30 times compared to manual methods, underscoring its potential for developing geospatial resources, such as complex map reasoning datasets. The website is live at: https://mapqator.github.io/ and a demo video is available at: https://youtu.be/7_aV9Wmhs6Q.

MapEval: A Map-Based Evaluation of Geo-Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models

Recent advancements in foundation models have enhanced AI systems' capabilities in autonomous tool usage and reasoning. However, their ability in location or map-based reasoning - which improves daily life by optimizing navigation, facilitating resource discovery, and streamlining logistics - has not been systematically studied. To bridge this gap, we introduce MapEval, a benchmark designed to assess diverse and complex map-based user queries with geo-spatial reasoning. MapEval features three task types (textual, API-based, and visual) that require collecting world information via map tools, processing heterogeneous geo-spatial contexts (e.g., named entities, travel distances, user reviews or ratings, images), and compositional reasoning, which all state-of-the-art foundation models find challenging. Comprising 700 unique multiple-choice questions about locations across 180 cities and 54 countries, MapEval evaluates foundation models' ability to handle spatial relationships, map infographics, travel planning, and navigation challenges. Using MapEval, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation of 28 prominent foundation models. While no single model excelled across all tasks, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Gemini-1.5-Pro achieved competitive performance overall. However, substantial performance gaps emerged, particularly in MapEval, where agents with Claude-3.5-Sonnet outperformed GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5-Pro by 16% and 21%, respectively, and the gaps became even more amplified when compared to open-source LLMs. Our detailed analyses provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of current models, though all models still fall short of human performance by more than 20% on average, struggling with complex map images and rigorous geo-spatial reasoning. This gap highlights MapEval's critical role in advancing general-purpose foundation models with stronger geo-spatial understanding.

ShowUI: One Vision-Language-Action Model for GUI Visual Agent

Building Graphical User Interface (GUI) assistants holds significant promise for enhancing human workflow productivity. While most agents are language-based, relying on closed-source API with text-rich meta-information (e.g., HTML or accessibility tree), they show limitations in perceiving UI visuals as humans do, highlighting the need for GUI visual agents. In this work, we develop a vision-language-action model in digital world, namely ShowUI, which features the following innovations: (i) UI-Guided Visual Token Selection to reduce computational costs by formulating screenshots as an UI connected graph, adaptively identifying their redundant relationship and serve as the criteria for token selection during self-attention blocks; (ii) Interleaved Vision-Language-Action Streaming that flexibly unifies diverse needs within GUI tasks, enabling effective management of visual-action history in navigation or pairing multi-turn query-action sequences per screenshot to enhance training efficiency; (iii) Small-scale High-quality GUI Instruction-following Datasets by careful data curation and employing a resampling strategy to address significant data type imbalances. With above components, ShowUI, a lightweight 2B model using 256K data, achieves a strong 75.1% accuracy in zero-shot screenshot grounding. Its UI-guided token selection further reduces 33% of redundant visual tokens during training and speeds up the performance by 1.4x. Navigation experiments across web Mind2Web, mobile AITW, and online MiniWob environments further underscore the effectiveness and potential of our model in advancing GUI visual agents. The models are available at https://github.com/showlab/ShowUI.

On the Tool Manipulation Capability of Open-source Large Language Models

Recent studies on software tool manipulation with large language models (LLMs) mostly rely on closed model APIs. The industrial adoption of these models is substantially constrained due to the security and robustness risks in exposing information to closed LLM API services. In this paper, we ask can we enhance open-source LLMs to be competitive to leading closed LLM APIs in tool manipulation, with practical amount of human supervision. By analyzing common tool manipulation failures, we first demonstrate that open-source LLMs may require training with usage examples, in-context demonstration and generation style regulation to resolve failures. These insights motivate us to revisit classical methods in LLM literature, and demonstrate that we can adapt them as model alignment with programmatic data generation, system prompts and in-context demonstration retrievers to enhance open-source LLMs for tool manipulation. To evaluate these techniques, we create the ToolBench, a tool manipulation benchmark consisting of diverse software tools for real-world tasks. We demonstrate that our techniques can boost leading open-source LLMs by up to 90% success rate, showing capabilities competitive to OpenAI GPT-4 in 4 out of 8 ToolBench tasks. We show that such enhancement typically requires about one developer day to curate data for each tool, rendering a recipe with practical amount of human supervision.

ToolDial: Multi-turn Dialogue Generation Method for Tool-Augmented Language Models

Tool-Augmented Language Models (TALMs) leverage external APIs to answer user queries across various domains. However, existing benchmark datasets for TALM research often feature simplistic dialogues that do not reflect real-world scenarios, such as the need for models to ask clarifying questions or proactively call additional APIs when essential information is missing. To address these limitations, we construct and release ToolDial, a dataset comprising 11,111 multi-turn dialogues, with an average of 8.95 turns per dialogue, based on APIs from RapidAPI. ToolDial has two key characteristics. First, the dialogues incorporate 16 user and system actions (e.g., "Request", "Clarify", "Fail inform") to capture the rich dynamics of real-world interactions. Second, we simulate dialogues where the system requests necessary information from the user based on API documentation and seeks additional APIs if the user fails to provide the required information. To facilitate this process, we introduce a method for generating an API graph that represents input and output compatibility between APIs. Using ToolDial, we evaluate a suite of language models on their ability to predict correct actions and extract input parameter values for API calls from the dialogue history. Modern language models achieve accuracy scores below 70%, indicating substantial room for improvement. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/holi-lab/ToolDial.

Better Language Model Inversion by Compactly Representing Next-Token Distributions

Language model inversion seeks to recover hidden prompts using only language model outputs. This capability has implications for security and accountability in language model deployments, such as leaking private information from an API-protected language model's system message. We propose a new method -- prompt inversion from logprob sequences (PILS) -- that recovers hidden prompts by gleaning clues from the model's next-token probabilities over the course of multiple generation steps. Our method is enabled by a key insight: The vector-valued outputs of a language model occupy a low-dimensional subspace. This enables us to losslessly compress the full next-token probability distribution over multiple generation steps using a linear map, allowing more output information to be used for inversion. Our approach yields massive gains over previous state-of-the-art methods for recovering hidden prompts, achieving 2--3.5 times higher exact recovery rates across test sets, in one case increasing the recovery rate from 17% to 60%. Our method also exhibits surprisingly good generalization behavior; for instance, an inverter trained on 16 generations steps gets 5--27 points higher prompt recovery when we increase the number of steps to 32 at test time. Furthermore, we demonstrate strong performance of our method on the more challenging task of recovering hidden system messages. We also analyze the role of verbatim repetition in prompt recovery and propose a new method for cross-family model transfer for logit-based inverters. Our findings show that next-token probabilities are a considerably more vulnerable attack surface for inversion attacks than previously known.

Improving Generalization in Task-oriented Dialogues with Workflows and Action Plans

Task-oriented dialogue is difficult in part because it involves understanding user intent, collecting information from the user, executing API calls, and generating helpful and fluent responses. However, for complex tasks one must also correctly do all of these things over multiple steps, and in a specific order. While large pre-trained language models can be fine-tuned end-to-end to create multi-step task-oriented dialogue agents that generate fluent text, our experiments confirm that this approach alone cannot reliably perform new multi-step tasks that are unseen during training. To address these limitations, we augment the dialogue contexts given to text2text transformers with known valid workflow names and action plans. Action plans consist of sequences of actions required to accomplish a task, and are encoded as simple sequences of keywords (e.g. verify-identity, pull-up-account, reset-password, etc.). We perform extensive experiments on the Action-Based Conversations Dataset (ABCD) with T5-small, base and large models, and show that such models: a) are able to more readily generalize to unseen workflows by following the provided plan, and b) are able to generalize to executing unseen actions if they are provided in the plan. In contrast, models are unable to fully accomplish new multi-step tasks when they are not provided action plan information, even when given new valid workflow names.

Parrot: Efficient Serving of LLM-based Applications with Semantic Variable

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has enabled LLM-based applications (a.k.a. AI agents or co-pilots), a new software paradigm that combines the strength of LLM and conventional software. Diverse LLM applications from different tenants could design complex workflows using multiple LLM requests to accomplish one task. However, they have to use the over-simplified request-level API provided by today's public LLM services, losing essential application-level information. Public LLM services have to blindly optimize individual LLM requests, leading to sub-optimal end-to-end performance of LLM applications. This paper introduces Parrot, an LLM service system that focuses on the end-to-end experience of LLM-based applications. Parrot proposes Semantic Variable, a unified abstraction to expose application-level knowledge to public LLM services. A Semantic Variable annotates an input/output variable in the prompt of a request, and creates the data pipeline when connecting multiple LLM requests, providing a natural way to program LLM applications. Exposing Semantic Variables to the public LLM service allows it to perform conventional data flow analysis to uncover the correlation across multiple LLM requests. This correlation opens a brand-new optimization space for the end-to-end performance of LLM-based applications. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Parrot can achieve up to an order-of-magnitude improvement for popular and practical use cases of LLM applications.

Build the web for agents, not agents for the web

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal counterparts have spurred significant interest in developing web agents -- AI systems capable of autonomously navigating and completing tasks within web environments. While holding tremendous promise for automating complex web interactions, current approaches face substantial challenges due to the fundamental mismatch between human-designed interfaces and LLM capabilities. Current methods struggle with the inherent complexity of web inputs, whether processing massive DOM trees, relying on screenshots augmented with additional information, or bypassing the user interface entirely through API interactions. This position paper advocates for a paradigm shift in web agent research: rather than forcing web agents to adapt to interfaces designed for humans, we should develop a new interaction paradigm specifically optimized for agentic capabilities. To this end, we introduce the concept of an Agentic Web Interface (AWI), an interface specifically designed for agents to navigate a website. We establish six guiding principles for AWI design, emphasizing safety, efficiency, and standardization, to account for the interests of all primary stakeholders. This reframing aims to overcome fundamental limitations of existing interfaces, paving the way for more efficient, reliable, and transparent web agent design, which will be a collaborative effort involving the broader ML community.

Binding Language Models in Symbolic Languages

Though end-to-end neural approaches have recently been dominating NLP tasks in both performance and ease-of-use, they lack interpretability and robustness. We propose Binder, a training-free neural-symbolic framework that maps the task input to a program, which (1) allows binding a unified API of language model (LM) functionalities to a programming language (e.g., SQL, Python) to extend its grammar coverage and thus tackle more diverse questions, (2) adopts an LM as both the program parser and the underlying model called by the API during execution, and (3) requires only a few in-context exemplar annotations. Specifically, we employ GPT-3 Codex as the LM. In the parsing stage, with only a few in-context exemplars, Codex is able to identify the part of the task input that cannot be answerable by the original programming language, correctly generate API calls to prompt Codex to solve the unanswerable part, and identify where to place the API calls while being compatible with the original grammar. In the execution stage, Codex can perform versatile functionalities (e.g., commonsense QA, information extraction) given proper prompts in the API calls. Binder achieves state-of-the-art results on WikiTableQuestions and TabFact datasets, with explicit output programs that benefit human debugging. Note that previous best systems are all finetuned on tens of thousands of task-specific samples, while Binder only uses dozens of annotations as in-context exemplars without any training. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUNLP/Binder .

ODS: A self-reporting system for radio telescopes to coexist with adaptive satellite constellations

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations bring broadband internet and cellular service to the most remote locations on the planet. Unfortunately, many of these locations also host some of the world's best optical and radio astronomy (RA) observatories. With the number of LEO satellites expected to increase by an order of magnitude in the upcoming decade, satellite downlink radio frequency interference (RFI) is a growing concern in protected radio-quiet areas like the United States National Radio Quiet Zone. When these satellites transmit in the spectrum near protected RA bands, undesired out-of-band emission can leak into these protected bands and impact scientific observations. In this paper, we present a self-reporting system - Operational Data Sharing (ODS) - which enables mutual awareness by publishing radio telescopes' operational information to a protected database that is available to satellite operators through a representational state transfer application programming interface (REST API). Satellite operators can use the ODS data to adapt their downlink tasking algorithms in real time to avoid overwhelming sensitive RA facilities, particularly, through the novel Telescope Boresight Avoidance (TBA) technique. Preliminary results from recent experiments between the NRAO and the SpaceX Starlink teams demonstrate the effectiveness of the ODS and TBA in reducing downlink RFI in the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array's observations in the 1990-1995 MHz and 10.7-12.7 GHz bands. This automated ODS system is beginning to be implemented by other RA facilities and could be utilized by other satellite operators in the near future.

Large Language Model Watermark Stealing With Mixed Integer Programming

The Large Language Model (LLM) watermark is a newly emerging technique that shows promise in addressing concerns surrounding LLM copyright, monitoring AI-generated text, and preventing its misuse. The LLM watermark scheme commonly includes generating secret keys to partition the vocabulary into green and red lists, applying a perturbation to the logits of tokens in the green list to increase their sampling likelihood, thus facilitating watermark detection to identify AI-generated text if the proportion of green tokens exceeds a threshold. However, recent research indicates that watermarking methods using numerous keys are susceptible to removal attacks, such as token editing, synonym substitution, and paraphrasing, with robustness declining as the number of keys increases. Therefore, the state-of-the-art watermark schemes that employ fewer or single keys have been demonstrated to be more robust against text editing and paraphrasing. In this paper, we propose a novel green list stealing attack against the state-of-the-art LLM watermark scheme and systematically examine its vulnerability to this attack. We formalize the attack as a mixed integer programming problem with constraints. We evaluate our attack under a comprehensive threat model, including an extreme scenario where the attacker has no prior knowledge, lacks access to the watermark detector API, and possesses no information about the LLM's parameter settings or watermark injection/detection scheme. Extensive experiments on LLMs, such as OPT and LLaMA, demonstrate that our attack can successfully steal the green list and remove the watermark across all settings.

Zero-Indexing Internet Search Augmented Generation for Large Language Models

Retrieval augmented generation has emerged as an effective method to enhance large language model performance. This approach typically relies on an internal retrieval module that uses various indexing mechanisms to manage a static pre-processed corpus. However, such a paradigm often falls short when it is necessary to integrate the most up-to-date information that has not been updated into the corpus during generative inference time. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach that leverages standard search engine APIs to dynamically integrate the latest online information (without maintaining any index for any fixed corpus), thereby improving the quality of generated content. We design a collaborative LLM-based paradigm, where we include: (i) a parser-LLM that determines if the Internet augmented generation is demanded and extracts the search keywords if so with a single inference; (ii) a mixed ranking strategy that re-ranks the retrieved HTML files to eliminate bias introduced from the search engine API; and (iii) an extractor-LLM that can accurately and efficiently extract relevant information from the fresh content in each HTML file. We conduct extensive empirical studies to evaluate the performance of this Internet search augmented generation paradigm. The experimental results demonstrate that our method generates content with significantly improved quality. Our system has been successfully deployed in a production environment to serve 01.AI's generative inference requests.

APIGen: Generative API Method Recommendation

Automatic API method recommendation is an essential task of code intelligence, which aims to suggest suitable APIs for programming queries. Existing approaches can be categorized into two primary groups: retrieval-based and learning-based approaches. Although these approaches have achieved remarkable success, they still come with notable limitations. The retrieval-based approaches rely on the text representation capabilities of embedding models, while the learning-based approaches require extensive task-specific labeled data for training. To mitigate the limitations, we propose APIGen, a generative API recommendation approach through enhanced in-context learning (ICL). APIGen involves two main components: (1) Diverse Examples Selection. APIGen searches for similar posts to the programming queries from the lexical, syntactical, and semantic perspectives, providing more informative examples for ICL. (2) Guided API Recommendation. APIGen enables large language models (LLMs) to perform reasoning before generating API recommendations, where the reasoning involves fine-grained matching between the task intent behind the queries and the factual knowledge of the APIs. With the reasoning process, APIGen makes recommended APIs better meet the programming requirement of queries and also enhances the interpretability of results. We compare APIGen with four existing approaches on two publicly available benchmarks. Experiments show that APIGen outperforms the best baseline CLEAR by 105.8% in method-level API recommendation and 54.3% in class-level API recommendation in terms of SuccessRate@1. Besides, APIGen achieves an average 49.87% increase compared to the zero-shot performance of popular LLMs such as GPT-4 in method-level API recommendation regarding the SuccessRate@3 metric.

Pop Quiz! Do Pre-trained Code Models Possess Knowledge of Correct API Names?

Recent breakthroughs in pre-trained code models, such as CodeBERT and Codex, have shown their superior performance in various downstream tasks. The correctness and unambiguity of API usage among these code models are crucial for achieving desirable program functionalities, requiring them to learn various API fully qualified names structurally and semantically. Recent studies reveal that even state-of-the-art pre-trained code models struggle with suggesting the correct APIs during code generation. However, the reasons for such poor API usage performance are barely investigated. To address this challenge, we propose using knowledge probing as a means of interpreting code models, which uses cloze-style tests to measure the knowledge stored in models. Our comprehensive study examines a code model's capability of understanding API fully qualified names from two different perspectives: API call and API import. Specifically, we reveal that current code models struggle with understanding API names, with pre-training strategies significantly affecting the quality of API name learning. We demonstrate that natural language context can assist code models in locating Python API names and generalize Python API name knowledge to unseen data. Our findings provide insights into the limitations and capabilities of current pre-trained code models, and suggest that incorporating API structure into the pre-training process can improve automated API usage and code representations. This work provides significance for advancing code intelligence practices and direction for future studies. All experiment results, data and source code used in this work are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7902072.

Automatically Extracting Web API Specifications from HTML Documentation

Web API specifications are machine-readable descriptions of APIs. These specifications, in combination with related tooling, simplify and support the consumption of APIs. However, despite the increased distribution of web APIs, specifications are rare and their creation and maintenance heavily relies on manual efforts by third parties. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach and an associated tool called D2Spec for extracting specifications from web API documentation pages. Given a seed online documentation page on an API, D2Spec first crawls all documentation pages on the API, and then uses a set of machine learning techniques to extract the base URL, path templates, and HTTP methods, which collectively describe the endpoints of an API. We evaluated whether D2Spec can accurately extract endpoints from documentation on 120 web APIs. The results showed that D2Spec achieved a precision of 87.5% in identifying base URLs, a precision of 81.3% and a recall of 80.6% in generating path templates, and a precision of 84.4% and a recall of 76.2% in extracting HTTP methods. In addition, we found that D2Spec was useful when applied to APIs with pre-existing API specifications: D2Spec revealed many inconsistencies between web API documentation and their corresponding publicly available specifications. Thus, D2Spec can be used by web API providers to keep documentation and specifications in synchronization.

API2Com: On the Improvement of Automatically Generated Code Comments Using API Documentations

Code comments can help in program comprehension and are considered as important artifacts to help developers in software maintenance. However, the comments are mostly missing or are outdated, specially in complex software projects. As a result, several automatic comment generation models are developed as a solution. The recent models explore the integration of external knowledge resources such as Unified Modeling Language class diagrams to improve the generated comments. In this paper, we propose API2Com, a model that leverages the Application Programming Interface Documentations (API Docs) as a knowledge resource for comment generation. The API Docs include the description of the methods in more details and therefore, can provide better context in the generated comments. The API Docs are used along with the code snippets and Abstract Syntax Trees in our model. We apply the model on a large Java dataset of over 130,000 methods and evaluate it using both Transformer and RNN-base architectures. Interestingly, when API Docs are used, the performance increase is negligible. We therefore run different experiments to reason about the results. For methods that only contain one API, adding API Docs improves the results by 4% BLEU score on average (BLEU score is an automatic evaluation metric used in machine translation). However, as the number of APIs that are used in a method increases, the performance of the model in generating comments decreases due to long documentations used in the input. Our results confirm that the API Docs can be useful in generating better comments, but, new techniques are required to identify the most informative ones in a method rather than using all documentations simultaneously.

Private-Library-Oriented Code Generation with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs), such as Codex and GPT-4, have recently showcased their remarkable code generation abilities, facilitating a significant boost in coding efficiency. This paper will delve into utilizing LLMs for code generation in private libraries, as they are widely employed in everyday programming. Despite their remarkable capabilities, generating such private APIs poses a formidable conundrum for LLMs, as they inherently lack exposure to these private libraries during pre-training. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework that emulates the process of programmers writing private code. This framework comprises two modules: APIFinder first retrieves potentially useful APIs from API documentation; and APICoder then leverages these retrieved APIs to generate private code. Specifically, APIFinder employs vector retrieval techniques and allows user involvement in the retrieval process. For APICoder, it can directly utilize off-the-shelf code generation models. To further cultivate explicit proficiency in invoking APIs from prompts, we continuously pre-train a reinforced version of APICoder, named CodeGenAPI. Our goal is to train the above two modules on vast public libraries, enabling generalization to private ones. Meanwhile, we create four private library benchmarks, including TorchDataEval, TorchDataComplexEval, MonkeyEval, and BeatNumEval, and meticulously handcraft test cases for each benchmark to support comprehensive evaluations. Numerous experiments on the four benchmarks consistently affirm the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, deeper analysis is also conducted to glean additional insights.

When LLMs Meet API Documentation: Can Retrieval Augmentation Aid Code Generation Just as It Helps Developers?

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has increasingly shown its power in extending large language models' (LLMs') capability beyond their pre-trained knowledge. Existing works have shown that RAG can help with software development tasks such as code generation, code update, and test generation. Yet, the effectiveness of adapting LLMs to fast-evolving or less common API libraries using RAG remains unknown. To bridge this gap, we take an initial step to study this unexplored yet practical setting - when developers code with a less common library, they often refer to its API documentation; likewise, when LLMs are allowed to look up API documentation via RAG, to what extent can LLMs be advanced? To mimic such a setting, we select four less common open-source Python libraries with a total of 1017 eligible APIs. We study the factors that affect the effectiveness of using the documentation of less common API libraries as additional knowledge for retrieval and generation. Our intensive study yields interesting findings: (1) RAG helps improve LLMs' performance by 83%-220%. (2) Example code contributes the most to advance LLMs, instead of the descriptive texts and parameter lists in the API documentation. (3) LLMs could sometimes tolerate mild noises (typos in description or incorrect parameters) by referencing their pre-trained knowledge or document context. Finally, we suggest that developers pay more attention to the quality and diversity of the code examples in the API documentation. The study sheds light on future low-code software development workflows.

DeepResearchGym: A Free, Transparent, and Reproducible Evaluation Sandbox for Deep Research

Deep research systems represent an emerging class of agentic information retrieval methods that generate comprehensive and well-supported reports to complex queries. However, most existing frameworks rely on dynamic commercial search APIs, which pose reproducibility and transparency challenges in addition to their cost. To address these limitations, we introduce DeepResearchGym, an open-source sandbox that combines a reproducible search API with a rigorous evaluation protocol for benchmarking deep research systems. The API indexes large-scale public web corpora, namely ClueWeb22 and FineWeb, using a state-of-the-art dense retriever and approximate nearest neighbor search via DiskANN. It achieves lower latency than popular commercial APIs while ensuring stable document rankings across runs, and is freely available for research use. To evaluate deep research systems' outputs, we extend the Researchy Questions benchmark with automatic metrics through LLM-as-a-judge assessments to measure alignment with users' information needs, retrieval faithfulness, and report quality. Experimental results show that systems integrated with DeepResearchGym achieve performance comparable to those using commercial APIs, with performance rankings remaining consistent across evaluation metrics. A human evaluation study further confirms that our automatic protocol aligns with human preferences, validating the framework's ability to help support controlled assessment of deep research systems. Our code and API documentation are available at https://www.deepresearchgym.ai.

Can ChatGPT replace StackOverflow? A Study on Robustness and Reliability of Large Language Model Code Generation

Recently, the large language models (LLMs) have shown extraordinary ability in understanding natural language and generating programming code. It has been a common practice of software engineers to consult LLMs when encountering coding questions. Although efforts have been made to avoid syntax errors and align the code with the intended semantics, the reliability and robustness of the code generationfrom LLMs have not yet been thoroughly studied. The executable code is not equivalent to the reliable and robust code, especially in the context of real-world software development. The misuse of APIs in the generated code could lead to severe problem, such as resource leaks, program crashes. To make things worse, the users of LLM code generation services are actually the developers that are most vulnerable to these code that seems right -- They are always novice developers that are not familiar with the APIs that LLMs generate code for them. Therefore, they could hardly tell the misuse in the code generated by LLMs, which further facilitates the incorrect code applied in real-world software. Existing code evaluation benchmark and datasets focus on crafting small tasks such as programming questions in coding interviews, which however deviates from the problem that developers would ask LLM for real-world coding help. To fill the missing piece, in this work, we propose a dataset RobustAPI for evaluating the reliability and robustness of code generated by LLMs. We collect 1208 coding questions from StackOverflow on 24 representative Java APIs. We summarize thecommon misuse patterns of these APIs and evaluate them oncurrent popular LLMs. The evaluation results show that evenfor GPT-4, 62% of the generated code contains API misuses,which would cause unexpected consequences if the code isintroduced into real-world software.

DocTer: Documentation Guided Fuzzing for Testing Deep Learning API Functions

Input constraints are useful for many software development tasks. For example, input constraints of a function enable the generation of valid inputs, i.e., inputs that follow these constraints, to test the function deeper. API functions of deep learning (DL) libraries have DL specific input constraints, which are described informally in the free form API documentation. Existing constraint extraction techniques are ineffective for extracting DL specific input constraints. To fill this gap, we design and implement a new technique, DocTer, to analyze API documentation to extract DL specific input constraints for DL API functions. DocTer features a novel algorithm that automatically constructs rules to extract API parameter constraints from syntactic patterns in the form of dependency parse trees of API descriptions. These rules are then applied to a large volume of API documents in popular DL libraries to extract their input parameter constraints. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the extracted constraints, DocTer uses the constraints to enable the automatic generation of valid and invalid inputs to test DL API functions. Our evaluation on three popular DL libraries (TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MXNet) shows that the precision of DocTer in extracting input constraints is 85.4%. DocTer detects 94 bugs from 174 API functions, including one previously unknown security vulnerability that is now documented in the CVE database, while a baseline technique without input constraints detects only 59 bugs. Most (63) of the 94 bugs are previously unknown, 54 of which have been fixed or confirmed by developers after we report them. In addition, DocTer detects 43 inconsistencies in documents, 39 of which are fixed or confirmed.

Using clarification questions to improve software developers' Web search

Context: Recent research indicates that Web queries written by software developers are not very successful in retrieving relevant results, performing measurably worse compared to general purpose Web queries. Most approaches up to this point have addressed this problem with software engineering-specific automated query reformulation techniques, which work without developer involvement but are limited by the content of the original query. In other words, these techniques automatically improve the existing query but can not contribute new, previously unmentioned, concepts. Objective: In this paper, we propose a technique to guide software developers in manually improving their own Web search queries. We examine a conversational approach that follows unsuccessful queries with a clarification question aimed at eliciting additional query terms, thus providing to the developer a clear dimension along which the query could be improved. Methods: We describe a set of clarification questions derived from a corpus of software developer queries and a neural approach to recommending them for a newly issued query. Results: Our evaluation indicates that the recommendation technique is accurate, predicting a valid clarification question 80% of the time and outperforms simple baselines, as well as, state-of-the-art Learning To Rank (LTR) baselines. Conclusion: As shown in the experimental results, the described approach is capable at recommending appropriate clarification questions to software developers and considered useful by a sample of developers ranging from novices to experienced professionals.

Dense Text Retrieval based on Pretrained Language Models: A Survey

Text retrieval is a long-standing research topic on information seeking, where a system is required to return relevant information resources to user's queries in natural language. From classic retrieval methods to learning-based ranking functions, the underlying retrieval models have been continually evolved with the ever-lasting technical innovation. To design effective retrieval models, a key point lies in how to learn the text representation and model the relevance matching. The recent success of pretrained language models (PLMs) sheds light on developing more capable text retrieval approaches by leveraging the excellent modeling capacity of PLMs. With powerful PLMs, we can effectively learn the representations of queries and texts in the latent representation space, and further construct the semantic matching function between the dense vectors for relevance modeling. Such a retrieval approach is referred to as dense retrieval, since it employs dense vectors (a.k.a., embeddings) to represent the texts. Considering the rapid progress on dense retrieval, in this survey, we systematically review the recent advances on PLM-based dense retrieval. Different from previous surveys on dense retrieval, we take a new perspective to organize the related work by four major aspects, including architecture, training, indexing and integration, and summarize the mainstream techniques for each aspect. We thoroughly survey the literature, and include 300+ related reference papers on dense retrieval. To support our survey, we create a website for providing useful resources, and release a code repertory and toolkit for implementing dense retrieval models. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive, practical reference focused on the major progress for dense text retrieval.

CodeSearchNet Challenge: Evaluating the State of Semantic Code Search

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving relevant code given a natural language query. While related to other information retrieval tasks, it requires bridging the gap between the language used in code (often abbreviated and highly technical) and natural language more suitable to describe vague concepts and ideas. To enable evaluation of progress on code search, we are releasing the CodeSearchNet Corpus and are presenting the CodeSearchNet Challenge, which consists of 99 natural language queries with about 4k expert relevance annotations of likely results from CodeSearchNet Corpus. The corpus contains about 6 million functions from open-source code spanning six programming languages (Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby). The CodeSearchNet Corpus also contains automatically generated query-like natural language for 2 million functions, obtained from mechanically scraping and preprocessing associated function documentation. In this article, we describe the methodology used to obtain the corpus and expert labels, as well as a number of simple baseline solutions for the task. We hope that CodeSearchNet Challenge encourages researchers and practitioners to study this interesting task further and will host a competition and leaderboard to track the progress on the challenge. We are also keen on extending CodeSearchNet Challenge to more queries and programming languages in the future.

Interpreting User Requests in the Context of Natural Language Standing Instructions

Users of natural language interfaces, generally powered by Large Language Models (LLMs),often must repeat their preferences each time they make a similar request. To alleviate this, we propose including some of a user's preferences and instructions in natural language -- collectively termed standing instructions -- as additional context for such interfaces. For example, when a user states I'm hungry, their previously expressed preference for Persian food will be automatically added to the LLM prompt, so as to influence the search for relevant restaurants. We develop NLSI, a language-to-program dataset consisting of over 2.4K dialogues spanning 17 domains, where each dialogue is paired with a user profile (a set of users specific standing instructions) and corresponding structured representations (API calls). A key challenge in NLSI is to identify which subset of the standing instructions is applicable to a given dialogue. NLSI contains diverse phenomena, from simple preferences to interdependent instructions such as triggering a hotel search whenever the user is booking tickets to an event. We conduct experiments on NLSI using prompting with large language models and various retrieval approaches, achieving a maximum of 44.7% exact match on API prediction. Our results demonstrate the challenges in identifying the relevant standing instructions and their interpretation into API calls.

Ragnarök: A Reusable RAG Framework and Baselines for TREC 2024 Retrieval-Augmented Generation Track

Did you try out the new Bing Search? Or maybe you fiddled around with Google AI~Overviews? These might sound familiar because the modern-day search stack has recently evolved to include retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. They allow searching and incorporating real-time data into large language models (LLMs) to provide a well-informed, attributed, concise summary in contrast to the traditional search paradigm that relies on displaying a ranked list of documents. Therefore, given these recent advancements, it is crucial to have an arena to build, test, visualize, and systematically evaluate RAG-based search systems. With this in mind, we propose the TREC 2024 RAG Track to foster innovation in evaluating RAG systems. In our work, we lay out the steps we've made towards making this track a reality -- we describe the details of our reusable framework, Ragnar\"ok, explain the curation of the new MS MARCO V2.1 collection choice, release the development topics for the track, and standardize the I/O definitions which assist the end user. Next, using Ragnar\"ok, we identify and provide key industrial baselines such as OpenAI's GPT-4o or Cohere's Command R+. Further, we introduce a web-based user interface for an interactive arena allowing benchmarking pairwise RAG systems by crowdsourcing. We open-source our Ragnar\"ok framework and baselines to achieve a unified standard for future RAG systems.

Skill Discovery for Software Scripting Automation via Offline Simulations with LLMs

Scripting interfaces enable users to automate tasks and customize software workflows, but creating scripts traditionally requires programming expertise and familiarity with specific APIs, posing barriers for many users. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, runtime code generation is severely limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. To bridge the gap, we propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset, a collection of verified scripts, by exploiting LLMs and publicly available scripting guides. Our framework comprises two components: (1) task creation, using top-down functionality guidance and bottom-up API synergy exploration to generate helpful tasks; and (2) skill generation with trials, refining and validating scripts based on execution feedback. To efficiently navigate the extensive API landscape, we introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based link prediction model to capture API synergy, enabling the generation of skills involving underutilized APIs and expanding the skillset's diversity. Experiments with Adobe Illustrator demonstrate that our framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. This is the first attempt to use software scripting interfaces as a testbed for LLM-based systems, highlighting the advantages of leveraging execution feedback in a controlled environment and offering valuable insights into aligning AI capabilities with user needs in specialized software domains.

HoneyBee: Progressive Instruction Finetuning of Large Language Models for Materials Science

We propose an instruction-based process for trustworthy data curation in materials science (MatSci-Instruct), which we then apply to finetune a LLaMa-based language model targeted for materials science (HoneyBee). MatSci-Instruct helps alleviate the scarcity of relevant, high-quality materials science textual data available in the open literature, and HoneyBee is the first billion-parameter language model specialized to materials science. In MatSci-Instruct we improve the trustworthiness of generated data by prompting multiple commercially available large language models for generation with an Instructor module (e.g. Chat-GPT) and verification from an independent Verifier module (e.g. Claude). Using MatSci-Instruct, we construct a dataset of multiple tasks and measure the quality of our dataset along multiple dimensions, including accuracy against known facts, relevance to materials science, as well as completeness and reasonableness of the data. Moreover, we iteratively generate more targeted instructions and instruction-data in a finetuning-evaluation-feedback loop leading to progressively better performance for our finetuned HoneyBee models. Our evaluation on the MatSci-NLP benchmark shows HoneyBee's outperformance of existing language models on materials science tasks and iterative improvement in successive stages of instruction-data refinement. We study the quality of HoneyBee's language modeling through automatic evaluation and analyze case studies to further understand the model's capabilities and limitations. Our code and relevant datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/BangLab-UdeM-Mila/NLP4MatSci-HoneyBee.

IndicLLMSuite: A Blueprint for Creating Pre-training and Fine-Tuning Datasets for Indian Languages

Despite the considerable advancements in English LLMs, the progress in building comparable models for other languages has been hindered due to the scarcity of tailored resources. Our work aims to bridge this divide by introducing an expansive suite of resources specifically designed for the development of Indic LLMs, covering 22 languages, containing a total of 251B tokens and 74.8M instruction-response pairs. Recognizing the importance of both data quality and quantity, our approach combines highly curated manually verified data, unverified yet valuable data, and synthetic data. We build a clean, open-source pipeline for curating pre-training data from diverse sources, including websites, PDFs, and videos, incorporating best practices for crawling, cleaning, flagging, and deduplication. For instruction-fine tuning, we amalgamate existing Indic datasets, translate/transliterate English datasets into Indian languages, and utilize LLaMa2 and Mixtral models to create conversations grounded in articles from Indian Wikipedia and Wikihow. Additionally, we address toxicity alignment by generating toxic prompts for multiple scenarios and then generate non-toxic responses by feeding these toxic prompts to an aligned LLaMa2 model. We hope that the datasets, tools, and resources released as a part of this work will not only propel the research and development of Indic LLMs but also establish an open-source blueprint for extending such efforts to other languages. The data and other artifacts created as part of this work are released with permissive licenses.

CoIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Code Information Retrieval Models

Despite the substantial success of Information Retrieval (IR) in various NLP tasks, most IR systems predominantly handle queries and corpora in natural language, neglecting the domain of code retrieval. Code retrieval is critically important yet remains under-explored, with existing methods and benchmarks inadequately representing the diversity of code in various domains and tasks. Addressing this gap, we present \name (Code Information Retrieval Benchmark), a robust and comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to assess code retrieval capabilities. \name comprises ten meticulously curated code datasets, spanning eight distinctive retrieval tasks across seven diverse domains. We first discuss the construction of \name and its diverse dataset composition. Further, we evaluate nine widely used retrieval models using \name, uncovering significant difficulties in performing code retrieval tasks even with state-of-the-art systems. To facilitate easy adoption and integration within existing research workflows, \name has been developed as a user-friendly Python framework, readily installable via pip. It shares same data schema as other popular benchmarks like MTEB and BEIR, enabling seamless cross-benchmark evaluations. Through \name, we aim to invigorate research in the code retrieval domain, providing a versatile benchmarking tool that encourages further development and exploration of code retrieval systems\url{ https://github.com/CoIR-team/coir}.

TicketTalk: Toward human-level performance with end-to-end, transaction-based dialog systems

We present a data-driven, end-to-end approach to transaction-based dialog systems that performs at near-human levels in terms of verbal response quality and factual grounding accuracy. We show that two essential components of the system produce these results: a sufficiently large and diverse, in-domain labeled dataset, and a neural network-based, pre-trained model that generates both verbal responses and API call predictions. In terms of data, we introduce TicketTalk, a movie ticketing dialog dataset with 23,789 annotated conversations. The movie ticketing conversations range from completely open-ended and unrestricted to more structured, both in terms of their knowledge base, discourse features, and number of turns. In qualitative human evaluations, model-generated responses trained on just 10,000 TicketTalk dialogs were rated to "make sense" 86.5 percent of the time, almost the same as human responses in the same contexts. Our simple, API-focused annotation schema results in a much easier labeling task making it faster and more cost effective. It is also the key component for being able to predict API calls accurately. We handle factual grounding by incorporating API calls in the training data, allowing our model to learn which actions to take and when. Trained on the same 10,000-dialog set, the model's API call predictions were rated to be correct 93.9 percent of the time in our evaluations, surpassing the ratings for the corresponding human labels. We show how API prediction and response generation scores improve as the dataset size incrementally increases from 5000 to 21,000 dialogs. Our analysis also clearly illustrates the benefits of pre-training. We are publicly releasing the TicketTalk dataset with this paper to facilitate future work on transaction-based dialogs.

Eir: Thai Medical Large Language Models

We present Eir Thai Medical LLM, a large language model with 8 billion parameters, specifically designed to enhance the accuracy of handling medical tasks in the Thai language. This model focuses on providing clear and easy-to-understand answers for both healthcare professionals and patients, thereby improving the efficiency of diagnosis and treatment processes. Human evaluation was conducted to ensure that the model adheres to care standards and provides unbiased answers. To prioritize data security, the model is deployed within the hospital's internal network, ensuring both high security and faster processing speeds. The internal API connection is secured with encryption and strict authentication measures to prevent data leaks and unauthorized access. We evaluated several open-source large language models with 8 billion parameters on four medical benchmarks: MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and the medical subset of MMLU. The best-performing baselines were used to develop Eir Thai Medical LLM. Our evaluation employed multiple questioning strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought reasoning, and ensemble/self-consistency voting methods. Our model outperformed commercially available Thai-language large language models by more than 10%. In addition, we developed enhanced model testing tailored for clinical use in Thai across 18 clinical tasks, where our model exceeded GPT-4o performance by more than 11%

Kuaipedia: a Large-scale Multi-modal Short-video Encyclopedia

Online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia, have been well-developed and researched in the last two decades. One can find any attributes or other information of a wiki item on a wiki page edited by a community of volunteers. However, the traditional text, images and tables can hardly express some aspects of an wiki item. For example, when we talk about ``Shiba Inu'', one may care more about ``How to feed it'' or ``How to train it not to protect its food''. Currently, short-video platforms have become a hallmark in the online world. Whether you're on TikTok, Instagram, Kuaishou, or YouTube Shorts, short-video apps have changed how we consume and create content today. Except for producing short videos for entertainment, we can find more and more authors sharing insightful knowledge widely across all walks of life. These short videos, which we call knowledge videos, can easily express any aspects (e.g. hair or how-to-feed) consumers want to know about an item (e.g. Shiba Inu), and they can be systematically analyzed and organized like an online encyclopedia. In this paper, we propose Kuaipedia, a large-scale multi-modal encyclopedia consisting of items, aspects, and short videos lined to them, which was extracted from billions of videos of Kuaishou (Kwai), a well-known short-video platform in China. We first collected items from multiple sources and mined user-centered aspects from millions of users' queries to build an item-aspect tree. Then we propose a new task called ``multi-modal item-aspect linking'' as an expansion of ``entity linking'' to link short videos into item-aspect pairs and build the whole short-video encyclopedia. Intrinsic evaluations show that our encyclopedia is of large scale and highly accurate. We also conduct sufficient extrinsic experiments to show how Kuaipedia can help fundamental applications such as entity typing and entity linking.

Sustainable Cloud Services for Verbal Interaction with Embodied Agents

This article presents the design and the implementation of a cloud system for knowledge-based autonomous interaction devised for Social Robots and other conversational agents. The system is particularly convenient for low-cost robots and devices: it can be used as a stand-alone dialogue system or as an integration to provide "background" dialogue capabilities to any preexisting Natural Language Processing ability that the robot may already have as part of its basic skills. By connecting to the cloud, developers are provided with a sustainable solution to manage verbal interaction through a network connection, with about 3,000 topics of conversation ready for "chit-chatting" and a library of pre-cooked plans that only needs to be grounded into the robot's physical capabilities. The system is structured as a set of REST API endpoints so that it can be easily expanded by adding new APIs to improve the capabilities of the clients connected to the cloud. Another key feature of the system is that it has been designed to make the development of its clients straightforward: in this way, multiple robots and devices can be easily endowed with the capability of autonomously interacting with the user, understanding when to perform specific actions, and exploiting all the information provided by cloud services. The article outlines and discusses the results of the experiments performed to assess the system's performance in terms of response time, paving the way for its use both for research and market solutions. Links to repositories with clients for ROS and popular robots such as Pepper and NAO are available on request.

GUing: A Mobile GUI Search Engine using a Vision-Language Model

App developers use the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of other apps as an important source of inspiration to design and improve their own apps. In recent years, research suggested various approaches to retrieve GUI designs that fit a certain text query from screenshot datasets acquired through automated GUI exploration. However, such text-to-GUI retrieval approaches only leverage the textual information of the GUI elements in the screenshots, neglecting visual information such as icons or background images. In addition, the retrieved screenshots are not steered by app developers and often lack important app features, e.g. whose UI pages require user authentication. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes GUing, a GUI search engine based on a vision-language model called UIClip, which we trained specifically for the app GUI domain. For this, we first collected app introduction images from Google Play, which usually display the most representative screenshots selected and often captioned (i.e. labeled) by app vendors. Then, we developed an automated pipeline to classify, crop, and extract the captions from these images. This finally results in a large dataset which we share with this paper: including 303k app screenshots, out of which 135k have captions. We used this dataset to train a novel vision-language model, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first of its kind in GUI retrieval. We evaluated our approach on various datasets from related work and in manual experiment. The results demonstrate that our model outperforms previous approaches in text-to-GUI retrieval achieving a Recall@10 of up to 0.69 and a HIT@10 of 0.91. We also explored the performance of UIClip for other GUI tasks including GUI classification and Sketch-to-GUI retrieval with encouraging results.

Guiding Language Models of Code with Global Context using Monitors

Language models of code (LMs) work well when the surrounding code in the vicinity of generation provides sufficient context. This is not true when it becomes necessary to use types or functionality defined in another module or library, especially those not seen during training. LMs suffer from limited awareness of such global context and end up hallucinating, e.g., using types defined in other files incorrectly. Recent work tries to overcome this issue by retrieving global information to augment the local context. However, this bloats the prompt or requires architecture modifications and additional training. Integrated development environments (IDEs) assist developers by bringing the global context at their fingertips using static analysis. We extend this assistance, enjoyed by developers, to the LMs. We propose a notion of monitors that use static analysis in the background to guide the decoding. Unlike a priori retrieval, static analysis is invoked iteratively during the entire decoding process, providing the most relevant suggestions on demand. We demonstrate the usefulness of our proposal by monitoring for type-consistent use of identifiers whenever an LM generates code for object dereference. To evaluate our approach, we curate PragmaticCode, a dataset of open-source projects with their development environments. On models of varying parameter scale, we show that monitor-guided decoding consistently improves the ability of an LM to not only generate identifiers that match the ground truth but also improves compilation rates and agreement with ground truth. We find that LMs with fewer parameters, when guided with our monitor, can outperform larger LMs. With monitor-guided decoding, SantaCoder-1.1B achieves better compilation rate and next-identifier match than the much larger text-davinci-003 model. The datasets and code will be released at https://aka.ms/monitors4codegen .

Improving Few-Shot Prompts with Relevant Static Analysis Products

Large Language Models (LLM) are a new class of computation engines, "programmed" via prompt engineering. We are still learning how to best "program" these LLMs to help developers. We start with the intuition that developers tend to consciously and unconsciously have a collection of semantics facts in mind when working on coding tasks. Mostly these are shallow, simple facts arising from a quick read. For a function, examples of facts might include parameter and local variable names, return expressions, simple pre- and post-conditions, and basic control and data flow, etc. One might assume that the powerful multi-layer architecture of transformer-style LLMs makes them inherently capable of doing this simple level of "code analysis" and extracting such information, implicitly, while processing code: but are they, really? If they aren't, could explicitly adding this information help? Our goal here is to investigate this question, using the code summarization task and evaluate whether automatically augmenting an LLM's prompt with semantic facts explicitly, actually helps. Prior work shows that LLM performance on code summarization benefits from few-shot samples drawn either from the same-project or from examples found via information retrieval methods (such as BM25). While summarization performance has steadily increased since the early days, there is still room for improvement: LLM performance on code summarization still lags its performance on natural-language tasks like translation and text summarization. We find that adding semantic facts actually does help! This approach improves performance in several different settings suggested by prior work, including for two different Large Language Models. In most cases, improvement nears or exceeds 2 BLEU; for the PHP language in the challenging CodeSearchNet dataset, this augmentation actually yields performance surpassing 30 BLEU.

An Automatic Approach for Generating Rich, Linked Geo-Metadata from Historical Map Images

Historical maps contain detailed geographic information difficult to find elsewhere covering long-periods of time (e.g., 125 years for the historical topographic maps in the US). However, these maps typically exist as scanned images without searchable metadata. Existing approaches making historical maps searchable rely on tedious manual work (including crowd-sourcing) to generate the metadata (e.g., geolocations and keywords). Optical character recognition (OCR) software could alleviate the required manual work, but the recognition results are individual words instead of location phrases (e.g., "Black" and "Mountain" vs. "Black Mountain"). This paper presents an end-to-end approach to address the real-world problem of finding and indexing historical map images. This approach automatically processes historical map images to extract their text content and generates a set of metadata that is linked to large external geospatial knowledge bases. The linked metadata in the RDF (Resource Description Framework) format support complex queries for finding and indexing historical maps, such as retrieving all historical maps covering mountain peaks higher than 1,000 meters in California. We have implemented the approach in a system called mapKurator. We have evaluated mapKurator using historical maps from several sources with various map styles, scales, and coverage. Our results show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods. The code has been made publicly available as modules of the Kartta Labs project at https://github.com/kartta-labs/Project.

Prompting Frameworks for Large Language Models: A Survey

Since the launch of ChatGPT, a powerful AI Chatbot developed by OpenAI, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in both academia and industry, bringing about a fundamental engineering paradigm shift in many areas. While LLMs are powerful, it is also crucial to best use their power where "prompt'' plays a core role. However, the booming LLMs themselves, including excellent APIs like ChatGPT, have several inherent limitations: 1) temporal lag of training data, and 2) the lack of physical capabilities to perform external actions. Recently, we have observed the trend of utilizing prompt-based tools to better utilize the power of LLMs for downstream tasks, but a lack of systematic literature and standardized terminology, partly due to the rapid evolution of this field. Therefore, in this work, we survey related prompting tools and promote the concept of the "Prompting Framework" (PF), i.e. the framework for managing, simplifying, and facilitating interaction with large language models. We define the lifecycle of the PF as a hierarchical structure, from bottom to top, namely: Data Level, Base Level, Execute Level, and Service Level. We also systematically depict the overall landscape of the emerging PF field and discuss potential future research and challenges. To continuously track the developments in this area, we maintain a repository at https://github.com/lxx0628/Prompting-Framework-Survey, which can be a useful resource sharing platform for both academic and industry in this field.

NOTE: Notable generation Of patient Text summaries through Efficient approach based on direct preference optimization

The discharge summary is a one of critical documents in the patient journey, encompassing all events experienced during hospitalization, including multiple visits, medications, tests, surgery/procedures, and admissions/discharge. Providing a summary of the patient's progress is crucial, as it significantly influences future care and planning. Consequently, clinicians face the laborious and resource-intensive task of manually collecting, organizing, and combining all the necessary data for a discharge summary. Therefore, we propose "NOTE", which stands for "Notable generation Of patient Text summaries through an Efficient approach based on direct preference optimization". NOTE is based on Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care- III dataset and summarizes a single hospitalization of a patient. Patient events are sequentially combined and used to generate a discharge summary for each hospitalization. In the present circumstances, large language models' application programming interfaces (LLMs' APIs) are widely available, but importing and exporting medical data presents significant challenges due to privacy protection policies in healthcare institutions. Moreover, to ensure optimal performance, it is essential to implement a lightweight model for internal server or program within the hospital. Therefore, we utilized DPO and parameter efficient fine tuning (PEFT) techniques to apply a fine-tuning method that guarantees superior performance. To demonstrate the practical application of the developed NOTE, we provide a webpage-based demonstration software. In the future, we will aim to deploy the software available for actual use by clinicians in hospital. NOTE can be utilized to generate various summaries not only discharge summaries but also throughout a patient's journey, thereby alleviating the labor-intensive workload of clinicians and aiming for increased efficiency.

BARS: Towards Open Benchmarking for Recommender Systems

The past two decades have witnessed the rapid development of personalized recommendation techniques. Despite significant progress made in both research and practice of recommender systems, to date, there is a lack of a widely-recognized benchmarking standard in this field. Many existing studies perform model evaluations and comparisons in an ad-hoc manner, for example, by employing their own private data splits or using different experimental settings. Such conventions not only increase the difficulty in reproducing existing studies, but also lead to inconsistent experimental results among them. This largely limits the credibility and practical value of research results in this field. To tackle these issues, we present an initiative project (namely BARS) aiming for open benchmarking for recommender systems. In comparison to some earlier attempts towards this goal, we take a further step by setting up a standardized benchmarking pipeline for reproducible research, which integrates all the details about datasets, source code, hyper-parameter settings, running logs, and evaluation results. The benchmark is designed with comprehensiveness and sustainability in mind. It covers both matching and ranking tasks, and also enables researchers to easily follow and contribute to the research in this field. This project will not only reduce the redundant efforts of researchers to re-implement or re-run existing baselines, but also drive more solid and reproducible research on recommender systems. We would like to call upon everyone to use the BARS benchmark for future evaluation, and contribute to the project through the portal at: https://openbenchmark.github.io/BARS.

Learning Performance-Improving Code Edits

The waning of Moore's Law has shifted the focus of the tech industry towards alternative methods for continued performance gains. While optimizing compilers are a standard tool to help increase program efficiency, programmers continue to shoulder much responsibility in crafting and refactoring code with better performance characteristics. In this paper, we investigate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to suggest functionally correct, performance improving code edits. We hypothesize that language models can suggest such edits in ways that would be impractical for static analysis alone. We investigate these questions by curating a large-scale dataset of Performance-Improving Edits, PIE. PIE contains trajectories of programs, where a programmer begins with an initial, slower version and iteratively makes changes to improve the program's performance. We use PIE to evaluate and improve the capacity of large language models. Specifically, use examples from PIE to fine-tune multiple variants of CODEGEN, a billion-scale Transformer-decoder model. Additionally, we use examples from PIE to prompt OpenAI's CODEX using a few-shot prompting. By leveraging PIE, we find that both CODEX and CODEGEN can generate performance-improving edits, with speedups of more than 2.5x for over 25% of the programs, for C++ and Python, even after the C++ programs were compiled using the O3 optimization level. Crucially, we show that PIE allows CODEGEN, an open-sourced and 10x smaller model than CODEX, to match the performance of CODEX on this challenging task. Overall, this work opens new doors for creating systems and methods that can help programmers write efficient code.

CoReQA: Uncovering Potentials of Language Models in Code Repository Question Answering

Large language models that enhance software development tasks, such as code generation, code completion, and code question answering (QA), have been extensively studied in both academia and the industry. The models are integrated into popular intelligent IDEs like JetBrains and Cursor. Current benchmarks for evaluating models' code comprehension capabilities primarily focus on code generation or completion, often neglecting QA, which is a crucial aspect of understanding code. Existing code QA benchmarks are derived from code comments with predefined patterns (e.g., CodeQA) or focus on specific domains, such as education (e.g., CS1QA). These benchmarks fail to capture the real-world complexity of software engineering and user requirements for understanding code repositories. To address this gap, we introduce CoReQA, a benchmark for Code Repository-level question answering, constructed from GitHub issues and comments from 176 popular repositories across four programming languages. Since questions and answers may include both natural language and code snippets, traditional evaluation metrics such as BLEU are inadequate for assessing repository-level QA performance. Thus, we provide an LLM-as-a-judge framework to evaluate QA performance from five aspects. Based on CoReQA, we evaluate the performance of three baselines, including two short-context models using generic retrieval strategies and one long-context model that utilizes the entire repository context. Evaluation results show that state-of-the-art proprietary and long-context models struggle to address repository-level questions effectively. Our analysis highlights the limitations of language models in assisting developers in understanding repositories and suggests future directions for improving repository comprehension systems through effective context retrieval methodologies.

Infinite Retrieval: Attention Enhanced LLMs in Long-Context Processing

Limited by the context window size of Large Language Models(LLMs), handling various tasks with input tokens exceeding the upper limit has been challenging, whether it is a simple direct retrieval task or a complex multi-hop reasoning task. Although various methods have been proposed to enhance the long-context processing capabilities of LLMs, they either incur substantial post-training costs, or require additional tool modules(e.g.,RAG), or have not shown significant improvement in realistic tasks. Our work observes the correlation between the attention distribution and generated answers across each layer, and establishes the attention allocation aligns with retrieval-augmented capabilities through experiments. Drawing on the above insights, we propose a novel method InfiniRetri that leverages the LLMs's own attention information to enable accurate retrieval across inputs of infinitely length. Our evaluations indicate that InfiniRetri achieves 100% accuracy in the Needle-In-a-Haystack(NIH) test over 1M tokens using a 0.5B parameter model, surpassing other method or larger models and setting a new state-of-the-art(SOTA). Moreover, our method achieves significant performance improvements on real-world benchmarks, with a maximum 288% improvement. In addition, InfiniRetri can be applied to any Transformer-based LLMs without additional training and substantially reduces inference latency and compute overhead in long texts. In summary, our comprehensive studies show InfiniRetri's potential for practical applications and creates a paradigm for retrievaling information using LLMs own capabilities under infinite-length tokens. Code will be released in link.

Evaluating Correctness and Faithfulness of Instruction-Following Models for Question Answering

Retriever-augmented instruction-following models are attractive alternatives to fine-tuned approaches for information-seeking tasks such as question answering (QA). By simply prepending retrieved documents in its input along with an instruction, these models can be adapted to various information domains and tasks without additional fine-tuning. While the model responses tend to be natural and fluent, the additional verbosity makes traditional QA evaluation metrics such as exact match (EM) and F1 unreliable for accurately quantifying model performance. In this work, we investigate the performance of instruction-following models across three information-seeking QA tasks. We use both automatic and human evaluation to evaluate these models along two dimensions: 1) how well they satisfy the user's information need (correctness), and 2) whether they produce a response based on the provided knowledge (faithfulness). Guided by human evaluation and analysis, we highlight the shortcomings of traditional metrics for both correctness and faithfulness. We then propose simple token-overlap based and model-based metrics that reflect the true performance of these models. Our analysis reveals that instruction-following models are competitive, and sometimes even outperform fine-tuned models for correctness. However, these models struggle to stick to the provided knowledge and often hallucinate in their responses. We hope our work encourages a more holistic evaluation of instruction-following models for QA. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/McGill-NLP/instruct-qa

Event-driven Real-time Retrieval in Web Search

Information retrieval in real-time search presents unique challenges distinct from those encountered in classical web search. These challenges are particularly pronounced due to the rapid change of user search intent, which is influenced by the occurrence and evolution of breaking news events, such as earthquakes, elections, and wars. Previous dense retrieval methods, which primarily focused on static semantic representation, lack the capacity to capture immediate search intent, leading to inferior performance in retrieving the most recent event-related documents in time-sensitive scenarios. To address this issue, this paper expands the query with event information that represents real-time search intent. The Event information is then integrated with the query through a cross-attention mechanism, resulting in a time-context query representation. We further enhance the model's capacity for event representation through multi-task training. Since publicly available datasets such as MS-MARCO do not contain any event information on the query side and have few time-sensitive queries, we design an automatic data collection and annotation pipeline to address this issue, which includes ModelZoo-based Coarse Annotation and LLM-driven Fine Annotation processes. In addition, we share the training tricks such as two-stage training and hard negative sampling. Finally, we conduct a set of offline experiments on a million-scale production dataset to evaluate our approach and deploy an A/B testing in a real online system to verify the performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Query Understanding via Intent Description Generation

Query understanding is a fundamental problem in information retrieval (IR), which has attracted continuous attention through the past decades. Many different tasks have been proposed for understanding users' search queries, e.g., query classification or query clustering. However, it is not that precise to understand a search query at the intent class/cluster level due to the loss of many detailed information. As we may find in many benchmark datasets, e.g., TREC and SemEval, queries are often associated with a detailed description provided by human annotators which clearly describes its intent to help evaluate the relevance of the documents. If a system could automatically generate a detailed and precise intent description for a search query, like human annotators, that would indicate much better query understanding has been achieved. In this paper, therefore, we propose a novel Query-to-Intent-Description (Q2ID) task for query understanding. Unlike those existing ranking tasks which leverage the query and its description to compute the relevance of documents, Q2ID is a reverse task which aims to generate a natural language intent description based on both relevant and irrelevant documents of a given query. To address this new task, we propose a novel Contrastive Generation model, namely CtrsGen for short, to generate the intent description by contrasting the relevant documents with the irrelevant documents given a query. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model by comparing with several state-of-the-art generation models on the Q2ID task. We discuss the potential usage of such Q2ID technique through an example application.

Compliance Cards: Computational Artifacts for Automated AI Regulation Compliance

As the artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain grows more complex, AI systems and models are increasingly likely to incorporate externally-sourced ingredients such as datasets and other models. In such cases, determining whether or not an AI system or model complies with the EU AI Act will require gathering compliance-related metadata about both the AI system or model at-large as well as those externally-supplied ingredients. There must then be an analysis that looks across all of this metadata to render a prediction about the compliance of the overall AI system or model. Up until now, this process has not been automated. Thus, it has not been possible to make real-time compliance determinations in scenarios where doing so would be advantageous, such as the iterative workflows of today's AI developers, search and acquisition of AI ingredients on communities like Hugging Face, federated and continuous learning, and more. To address this shortcoming, we introduce a highly automated system for AI Act compliance analysis. This system has two key elements. First is an interlocking set of computational artifacts that capture compliance-related metadata about both: (1) the AI system or model at-large; (2) any constituent ingredients such as datasets and models. Second is an automated analysis algorithm that operates across those computational artifacts to render a run-time prediction about whether or not the overall AI system or model complies with the AI Act. Working together, these elements promise to enhance and accelerate AI Act compliance assessments.

Science Hierarchography: Hierarchical Organization of Science Literature

Scientific knowledge is growing rapidly, making it challenging to track progress and high-level conceptual links across broad disciplines. While existing tools like citation networks and search engines make it easy to access a few related papers, they fundamentally lack the flexible abstraction needed to represent the density of activity in various scientific subfields. We motivate SCIENCE HIERARCHOGRAPHY, the goal of organizing scientific literature into a high-quality hierarchical structure that allows for the categorization of scientific work across varying levels of abstraction, from very broad fields to very specific studies. Such a representation can provide insights into which fields are well-explored and which are under-explored. To achieve the goals of SCIENCE HIERARCHOGRAPHY, we develop a range of algorithms. Our primary approach combines fast embedding-based clustering with LLM-based prompting to balance the computational efficiency of embedding methods with the semantic precision offered by LLM prompting. We demonstrate that this approach offers the best trade-off between quality and speed compared to methods that heavily rely on LLM prompting, such as iterative tree construction with LLMs. To better reflect the interdisciplinary and multifaceted nature of research papers, our hierarchy captures multiple dimensions of categorization beyond simple topic labels. We evaluate the utility of our framework by assessing how effectively an LLM-based agent can locate target papers using the hierarchy. Results show that this structured approach enhances interpretability, supports trend discovery, and offers an alternative pathway for exploring scientific literature beyond traditional search methods. Code, data and demo: https://github.com/JHU-CLSP/science-hierarchography{https://github.com/JHU-CLSP/science-hierarchography}

Fine Tuning LLM for Enterprise: Practical Guidelines and Recommendations

There is a compelling necessity from enterprises for fine tuning LLMs (Large Language Models) o get them trained on proprietary domain knowledge. The challenge is to imbibe the LLMs with domain specific knowledge using the most optimial resource and cost and in the best possible time. Many enterprises rely on RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) which does not need LLMs to be ine-tuned but they are limited by the quality of vector databases and their retrieval capabilities rather than the intrinsic capabilities of the LLMs themselves. In our current work we focus on fine tuning LLaMA, an open source LLM using proprietary documents and code from an enterprise repository and use the fine tuned models to evaluate the quality of responses. As part of this work, we aim to guide beginners on how to start with fine tuning an LLM for documentation and code by making educated guesses on size of GPU required and options that are available for formatting the data. We also propose pre processing recipes for both documentation and code to prepare dataset in different formats. The proposed methods of data preparation for document datasets are forming paragraph chunks, forming question and answer pairs and forming keyword and paragraph chunk pairs. For code dataset we propose forming summary and function pairs. Further, we qualitatively evaluate the results of the models for domain specific queries. Finally, we also propose practical guidelines and recommendations for fine tuning LLMs.

SC2EGSet: StarCraft II Esport Replay and Game-state Dataset

As a relatively new form of sport, esports offers unparalleled data availability. Despite the vast amounts of data that are generated by game engines, it can be challenging to extract them and verify their integrity for the purposes of practical and scientific use. Our work aims to open esports to a broader scientific community by supplying raw and pre-processed files from StarCraft II esports tournaments. These files can be used in statistical and machine learning modeling tasks and related to various laboratory-based measurements (e.g., behavioral tests, brain imaging). We have gathered publicly available game-engine generated "replays" of tournament matches and performed data extraction and cleanup using a low-level application programming interface (API) parser library. Additionally, we open-sourced and published all the custom tools that were developed in the process of creating our dataset. These tools include PyTorch and PyTorch Lightning API abstractions to load and model the data. Our dataset contains replays from major and premiere StarCraft II tournaments since 2016. To prepare the dataset, we processed 55 tournament "replaypacks" that contained 17930 files with game-state information. Based on initial investigation of available StarCraft II datasets, we observed that our dataset is the largest publicly available source of StarCraft II esports data upon its publication. Analysis of the extracted data holds promise for further Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), psychological, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and sports-related studies in a variety of supervised and self-supervised tasks.

DAPFAM: A Domain-Aware Patent Retrieval Dataset Aggregated at the Family Level

In the landscape of publicly available patent retrieval datasets, the need for explicit indomain and out-of-domain labeling, multi-jurisdiction coverage, balanced query domain representation and manageable sizes that support sub document level experiments on moderate computational resources is often overlooked. To address these gaps, we propose DAPFAM, a new open access domain-aware patent retrieval dataset constructed at the simple-family level. The dataset contains 1,247 domain balanced full text query families and 45,336 full text target families. The dataset is enriched by clear relevance judgments (forward/backward citations as positive links, random negatives), as well as explicit in-domain or out-of-domain relationships via a novel proposed labelling scheme based on via International Patent Classification (IPC) codes, resulting in 49,869 evaluation pairs. The dataset is multi jurisdictional, requires little to no preprocessing for retrieval evaluation, and remains of a size manageable for entities with limited ressources allowing for sub document level retrieval experiments without excessive computational costs. We describe our three-step data-curation pipeline, present comprehensive dataset statistics, and provide baseline experiments using lexical and neural retrieval methods. Our baseline experiments highlight significant challenges in crossdomain patent retrieval. The dataset will be publicly available (for now the access link is this repository: https://osf.io/vbyzd/?view_only=1a40242e0d1941a58aa854af3e50cf6b).